EFFECTS OF BILINGUALISM ON WH-QUESTION STRUCTURES I …

Quadros, Ronice M?ller de, Lillo-Martin, Diane & Chen Pichler, Deborah (2013). Early Effects of Bilingualism on WH-Question Structures: Insight from Sign-Speech Bilingualism. In Stavroula Stavrakaki, Marina Lalioti and Polyxeni Konstantinopoulou (Eds.), Proceedings

of GALA 2011, 300-308. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.

EARLY EFFECTS OF BILINGUALISM ON WH-QUESTION STRUCTURES:

INSIGHT FROM SIGN-SPEECH BILINGUALISM1

RONICE M?LLER DE QUADROS, DIANE LILLO-MARTIN, AND DEBORAH CHEN PICHLER

1. Introduction

In our long-term project, we are studying children who are simultaneously acquiring a sign language and a spoken language: either Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), or American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Our goals are to explore the effects of this bimodal bilingualism as offering unique insight on the various ways in which a bilingual's languages might interact (Chen Pichler, Quadros & Lillo-Martin 2010; Lillo-Martin, Koulidobrova, Quadros & Chen Pichler in press; Lillo-Martin, Quadros, Koulidobrova & Chen Pichler 2009). In the present paper, we focus on the structure of WH-questions produced by the children in their spoken languages, and present our model of a bilingual language architecture which allows for the types of structures we observe.

The structures of interest in this paper are illustrated in (1). They are questions used in regular direct question contexts (not `echo' or Common Ground contexts).

(1) a. You eat what?

b. The ball rolls to where? in situ/final

(2) a. What you buy what? b. Where Mommy where? doubling

(3) a. Que eu quero que? b. Onde est? o livro onde? doubling (BP)

Examples like these are produced by ASL/English or Libras/BP bimodal bilinguals. In order to see whether their appearance in the spoken languages might

1 We warmly thank our bimodal bilingual child participants and their families, as well as the research assistants and collaborators in our project. This research was supported in part by Award Number R01DC009263 from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIDCD or the NIH. Support was also provided by the Gallaudet Research Institute and by CNPq (Brazilian National Council of Technological and Scientific Development) Grant #200031/2009!0 and #470111/2007!0. 1

BIMODAL BILINGUAL WH-QUESTIONS

be related to bilingualism, let us briefly turn to a review of the structure of WHquestions in ASL and Libras (based on Nunes & Quadros 2007; Petronio & LilloMartin 1997).

In both of these sign languages, WH-elements may appear in the sentenceinitial position (4). WH-elements may also appear in situ (5), without the need for a particular Common Ground context. In addition, WH-elements may appear `doubled', showing up in both the initial and sentence-final position (6). These cases are described as emphatic by some authors (e.g., Nunes & Quadros 2007). Finally, WH-elements may appear in the sentence-final position (7). Many such cases may be considered in situ, but they may also be derived in a way similar to the double structures, with only the final copy appearing. In this paper, we will use the label in situ/final acknowledging that it is impossible to distinguish the analysis in all the cases discussed here.

wh

(4) a. WHO BUY CAR

`Who bought a car?'

wh

(5)

JOHN SEE WHO TODAY

`Who did John see today?'

wh

(6) a. WHO JOHN SEE WHO

`WHO did John see?'

wh

(7) a. JOHN SEE WHO

`Who did John see?'

____________wh b. WHO YOU LIKE

`Who do you like?'

wh b. WHAT JOHN BUY WHAT

`WHAT did John buy?' _________________wh b. BUY COFFEE WHERE `Where did (you) buy coffee?'

Given that examples as in (1) are produced in contexts other than typical for insitu questions in English, and neither English nor BP permits doubling of the WHelement as in (2)-(3), while the sign languages do permit such structures, it seems safe to suggest that these examples illustrate some type of apparent cross-linguistic influence, in which structures from the sign language show up with words of the spoken language.

Cases in which children produce structures illustrating this type of crosslinguistic influence are not unheard of (e.g., Yip & Matthews 2007 on WH-in-situ in the English of Cantonese-English bilinguals). However, it is important to note that these types of structures are not restricted to children in an early stage of development. They are also observed among bimodal bilingual adults, who ? in the sociolinguistically appropriate contexts ? combine aspects of their languages in ways that include producing utterances with the words of one language but the structure of the other (Emmorey et al. 2008). We use the term `code-synthesis' to

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RONICE M?LLER DE QUADROS, DIANE LILLO-MARTIN, AND DEBORAH CHEN PICHLER

include this type of language mixing along with code-switching in the traditional sense and code-blending (bilingual use of signs and speech).

Note that bimodal bilinguals are not unique in their (adult) use of such mixed structures. Gonz?lez-Vilbazo & L?pez (in press) describe another instance in the productions dubbed `Esplugish' produced by Spanish-German bilinguals in the German School of Barcelona. One example discussed by Gonz?lez-Vilbazo & L?pez concerns code-switching with light verbs. As they describe the phenomenon, "in the Esplugish light verb construction the VP is composed of a German lexical verb and the other lexical items can also be German but the linearization, prosody and expression of focus/background of the VP follow Spanish patterns."

These findings tell us that the use of structure from one language along with the words of another language is a bilingualism effect that is not restricted to children whose grammars are still developing. Rather, it must fall out from the nature of the bilingual's language architecture. Our philosophy is that this architecture should not have special mechanisms and constraints specifically for bilinguals, but it should be the same as that used for monolinguals (MacSwan 2000), with two sets of lexical elements. Our diagram of this model is given in Figure 1.

The model incorporates elements of minimalist syntax and distributed morphology. The roots and morphemes that are the input to the syntactic derivation can come from Languagex, Languagey, or in fact from both. Similarly, at Vocabulary Insertion, elements from either language can be used, provided their feature requirements are met. These concepts give us code-switching, codeblending, and apparent cross-linguistic influence.

Figure 1. Bilingual language synthesis

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BIMODAL BILINGUAL WH-QUESTIONS

Under this model, how would examples of sign-influenced speech such as those in (1)-(3) be derived? Let us consider the proposal by Tieu (2010) for CantoneseEnglish bilinguals (data from Yip & Matthews 2007). Pires & Taylor (2007) propose that in English, WH-in-situ is licensed when the set of possible answers is part of the Common Ground. They argue for a distinct null question complementizer that does not trigger movement of the WH-phrase, in addition to the complementizer which is associated with movement. Tieu suggests that English therefore has two (relevant) question complementizers, but Cantonese has only one, which can be used in either regular or Common Ground contexts. When the bilingual child is speaking English, the Cantonese complementizer may be chosen. This would result in production of WH-in-situ in non-Common Ground contexts.

Similary, we would propose that ASL and Libras have three WHcomplementizers: one triggers movement, one is used in Common Ground contexts, and the third does not trigger movement but also does not require Common Ground contexts ? allowing for WH-in-situ in regular direct questions. This allows for the bimodal bilingual children to produce WH-in-situ in their spoken langauges.

Our account for the presence of `doubling' structures in BP and English follows similar lines. Nunes & Quadros (2004) account for doubling by proposing a functional element with a [+focus] feature. According to Nunes' (2004) theory of linearization, both copies of the focused element may be pronounced following morphological fusion of the focus head with the focused element. We assume that choosing the [+focus] functional element during a derivation using words from the spoken language can result in doubling structures such as those shown in (2)-(3).

Our proposal thus leads us to expect that bimodal bilingual children may use WH-in-situ and WH-doubling structures that are not attested in the speech of monolingual English- or BP-speaking children. In the next section we describe the study we conducted to test this prediction.

2. The study

Method

We analysed spontaneous production data consisting of videotaped naturalistic play sessions. These sessions were filmed weekly, with different sets of experimenters interacting with the children in order to target either their sign language or their spoken language. The interlocutors are all bilingual and they do sometimes code mix with the children, even though they aim for the use of one language or the other.

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RONICE M?LLER DE QUADROS, DIANE LILLO-MARTIN, AND DEBORAH CHEN PICHLER

The videos were transcribed using ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator software developed and distributed for free by the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen; ), following the procedure detailed in Chen Picher, Hochgesang, Lillo-Martin & Quadros (2010). Transcripts were searched and coded with review of the audio-video information.

Participants

In this paper we present results from two bimodal bilingual children acquiring ASL/English, and one child acquiring Libras/BP (all males). The age range of the period investigated and the approximate total number of child utterances are provided in Table 1.

Table 1. Bimodal bilingual participants

Name

Languages

Age Range

Ben

ASL/Eng

1;11-3;03

Tom

ASL/Eng

1;11-4;05

Igor

Libras/BP

2;01-3;02

# Sessions 18 31 7

# Utterances ~6000 ~6000 ~3000

In addition to the data from bilingual children, we examined monolingual English and monolingual BP data for comparison. For monolingual English, we consulted CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000) data from four children, as detailed in Table 2. We coded data from Adam and Nina, and we rely on Tieu's (2010) description of data for Eve and Naomi.

Table 2. Monolingual English data

Name

Age Range # Sessions

Adam

2;03-2;11

12

Eve

1;06-2;03

20

Naomi

1;03-4;09

93

Nina

1;11-2;11

38

# Utterances ~10,000

~12,000 ~22,000

For monolingual BP, we rely on data for two children reported in the literature: the child Gabriela studied by Sikansi (1999), and the child N studied by Grolla (2005), as described in Table 3.

Table 3. Monolingual BP data

Name

Age Range

Gabriela

2;04-3;10

N

2;00-4;00

5

# Sessions 26 53

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